London — The unplanned outage at the Total-operated Culzean gas field in the UK North Sea has been extended by another day and production is now not expected to resume until Friday, according to the latest REMIT update on the outage.
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Register NowCulzean -- which only started production on June 11 -- has been hit by a number of technical problems since it began operations.
According to an updated REMIT note published late Wednesday, Culzean's production capacity has been cut to zero for Thursday from its current technical daily capacity of 130 GWh (12 million cu m).
The outage is not expected to be resolved until 06:00 local time on Friday.
At the start of the outage, the operator said the capacity had been cut to 58 GWh (5 million cu m) for Tuesday, which was then reduced down to just 25 GWh (2 million cu m) and then zero.
"Issues [are] preventing gas export," the note said.
Culzean gas had continued to be supplied to Teesside from stocks, but no gas is now reaching shore.
There was no explanation for the outage, which follows a previous issue on August 1, that was only resolved on August 8 after several restart attempts.
PLATEAU PRODUCTION
Culzean is one of the UK's biggest producing fields and is expected to ramp up to plateau production of 14 million cubic meter/day.
At those rates, Culzean is capable of meeting between 5% and 10% of UK gas demand.
The duration of plateau production could be limited, however, at around two to five years, depending on the reservoir behavior.
The high-pressure, high-temperature field was discovered in 2008, with reserves estimated at 1.3-1.5 Tcf (37-43 Bcm).
Total has a 49.99% stake in the $4.3 billion project, with BP holding 32% and JX Nippon 18.01%.
-- Stuart Elliott, stuart.elliott@spglobal.com
-- Edited by Norazlina Jumaat, norazlina.jumaat@spglobal.com